The present application relates to methods and systems for remotely provisioning and managing immediately playable games with license control in secure environments.
Note that the points discussed below may reflect the hindsight gained from the disclosed inventions, and are not necessarily admitted to be prior art.
Conventionally, software games and other applications can be provided, maintained and recovered for Small Office/Home Office (“SOHO”) environments, homes, Internet Cafes, educational establishments and other organizations in several ways, including by using physical media, download, “Disk Images”, the complete contents of a device's user environment, Virtual Desktop solutions, or “Pixel Streaming”, where application rendering services are offloaded to an edge server located in the cloud.
For example, when a user wishes to play a game or use another application where rendering is performed in the cloud, he is connected to an edge server, which allocates a virtual desktop for the user. The cloud-rendered image is then compressed and routed to the gaming platform or user desktop.
Currently there are a number of edge server based cloud gaming services companies, including Onlive, Gaikai Inc and Otoy.
Software-based gaming is an enormous global market. This market is driven heavily by instant gratification for the customers. The core set of players are predominantly (approximately) 12-35 year old males. Purchases are often impulsive. Flagship (“AAA”) game titles are advertised months—or even years—in advance, at trade shows and in online trade publications, to build up favorable advance notices. AAA title release week sales numbers are closely watched precisely because electronic gaming, regardless of platform, is so oriented towards instant gratification and the buildup towards a must-have purchase. Just as importantly for smaller-budget (often cheaper) titles, the ability to provide gamers a true impulse purchase that can be immediately played is critical to generating word-of-mouth leading to a wider audience. Gamers are, by the quickfire, rapid-reward nature of the pastime, an impatient group with a short attention span, and the faster that software can be loaded to a playable state on a gaming device, the more likely a gamer is to still feel like playing when the game is ready. Gaming software, in this respect, is notably different from other software.